Build: Pixelmator and AnyFont for iPad

While I’m waiting to be able to announce my next book, I’m going to show off some different kinds of creative projects in the first part of weekly livestream. This week, I’m trying out the iPad version of Pixelmator, the popular graphics application. It’s one of two fairly well-known low-cost Photoshop alternatives on the Mac (the other being Acorn), and is the only one of the two that has an iOS version. It relies heavily on Core Image for powerful image processing abilities, and includes both effects like blurring, sharpening and color tools, as well as a layer system for compositing final pictures together out of many parts.

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Play: Pinball Arcade: Star Trek The Next Generation

Currently ranked as the #3 table of all time, Williams’ 1993 pinball Star Trek The Next Generation is a perfect combination of reverence for its source material and deeply satisfying gameplay. Built about five seasons into TNG, the table includes savvy use of lore (but not Lore, of course), catchphrases and dialogue recorded by the entire cast, and a deep rule book that offers seven missions that all play differently and tie in smartly to the TNG universe. Other modes include run-ins with the Ferengi, Romulans, and Cardassians, and a multiball battle with the modified Borg supership from season 5. Fortunately, I had a good run in the middle of this video and made it to the game’s ultimate mode: the six-multiball “Final Frontier”

Read: Muv-Luv Alternative, Episode 6, Part 2

Roused from sleep at 0400 hours, the cadets learn that a coup d’etat is underway in the capital. Rebel forces – the same ones that Mikoto’s dad referred to in his weird chat with Yuuko a week ago – have seized most government facilities and assassinated many officials, including the prime minister, Chizuru’s father. As Takeru overhears details of the international political wrangling behind the incident, he realizes him himself may have set it off by allowing the Mt. Tengen relocation to occur (changing the events he experienced in Muv-Luv Unlimited), and that it could be further related to Ayamine’s secret intrigues.

Build: Keynote for iPad

While I’m waiting to be able to announce my next book, I’m going to show off some different kinds of creative projects in the first part of weekly livestream. This week, I show off my favorite productivity app for iPad, Keynote, which lets you create slideshow presentations with nearly as much power as the desktop app offers. Combined with the convenience of iCloud syncing and a file format that works on both macOS and iOS, it’s what I use for presenting at developer conferences and anime conventions. This demo focuses on file sharing, simple slide set up, and “builds”, which perform the animations that Keynote is known for.

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Play: Odyssey²

The Odyssey² console, introduced in 1978, was Magnavox’s answer to the challenge presented by the Atari VCS (later renamed the 2600). It was a modest success, less popular than the VCS or the Mattel Intellivision, but did a few interesting things. It came with a built-in keyboard, but with only 64 *bytes* of RAM, couldn’t hold on to any meaningful amount of user-entered content. Its graphics are far more committed to sprites than other systems of the time, meaning that while Odyssey² games rarely flicker, they can’t do scrolling at all, and interacting with the background is difficult. This shows up in game designs like the Pac-Man knockoff “K. C. Munchkin”, where instead of eating dozens of dots off the maze floor, there are only 12 dots… but they move. And while many games released for the system have clear arcade inspirations, there’s no accounting for the deeply weird “Killer Bees”, arguably the best game made for the platform.

Read: Muv-Luv Alternative, Episode 6, Part 1

Takeru is delighted with his progress changing the BETA-verse timeline, having briefly returned to his own timeline to get help with Yuuko’s equations, and skipping the entire misadventure at Mt. Tengen. However, his giddiness at saving 10 days leads to an argument with Meiya in the PX, and when he runs after Ayamine to soothe things over, she drops a letter that suggests she might be involved with secret intrigues that would be worthy of a court-martial if anyone found out. What the hell is she up to?

Build: Encoding Video (and Animated GIFs!) in Compressor

While I’m waiting to be able to announce my next book, I’m going to show off some different kinds of creative projects in the first part of weekly livestream. This time, I show the least-known of Apple’s pro video apps, Compressor, and look at its tight integration with Final Cut Pro for doing end-of-project encoding. This lets you target different kinds of destinations like video hosting sites or iOS devices, and lets you apply video and audio filters to counteract the effects of lossy compression. And — who knew? — Compressor makes animated GIFs too.

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Play: Overload (0.9)

A year after the last time I streamed Overload, this Kickstarter-backed spiritual descendant of “Descent” is one version away from its golden master release. So, it seemed like a good time to check back in. Since the last time I looked, the game has gotten faster and more generous with support items, so instead of lengthy firefights with single robots like in the early access builds, you tend to have short, fast fights, and often have to deal with packs of robots.

Also, playing Overload while encoding two streams in Wirecast (the live one and an archive) may be the hardest I’ve ever pushed my 2013 Mac Pro. The fan was really blowing at the end, and Wirecast tells me I dropped over 16,000 frames, which is why this video has a fairly low framerate. (The Mythical Modern Modular Mac Pro cannot come soon enough!)

Read: Muv-Luv Alternative, Episode 5, Part 4

Having spent three hours back in his own timeline (the world of Muv-Luv Extra), Takeru spends time with the one who made it possible: Kasumi, the withdrawn psychic who keeps him mentally tethered to this world. He takes her outside and up to the tree behind the school, and learns more about her fearsome powers, and continues to wonder about her seeming connection to Sumika.

Build: Creating a Blend-S Meme Video in Motion

While I’m waiting to be able to announce my next book, I’m going to show off some different kinds of creative projects in the first part of weekly livestream. This time, we’ll check out 2017’s infamous “Blend-S” anime meme — “Smile! Sweet! Sister! Sadistic! Surprise!” — and how to easily reproduce it in Apple Motion by grabbing a short dialogue clip of an “S” word, placing text elements on the timeline, and then using simple effects like motion path and fade in to reproduce the effect.

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Play: Muv-Luv Alternative Strike Frontier

Everything else has a mobage, why not Muv-Luv? Strike Frontier brings the Muv-Luv Alternative franchise to the usual mobage mechanics of collecting cards, equipping a team to max out their abilities, earning in-game currency, and of course spending real money for the SSR card of your favorite character or mech. Also, sometimes you get to play a game.

Read: Muv-Luv Alternative, Episode 5, Part 3

After three promising but brief false starts, Yuuko succeeds in sending Takeru back to his original timeline, the world of Muv-Luv Extra, where he needs to contact that world’s Yuuko and get the equations needed by the BETA-verse Yuuko to complete the 00 Unit. Takeru’s also under orders to avoid interacting with anyone who might change the timeline, but when Sumika corners him on the street, what can he do? Upon his return, Yuuko has another surprise for him: she finally reveals the nature of Kasumi’s powers, and her creation as a Soviet lab-grown psychic as part of the failed Alternative III project.

Having finished the material from iOS 10 SDK Development in episode 25, I’m going to take a few weeks off from livestreaming. This will give me time to reload the content pipeline with new creative projects, iOS games to play, and to make some technical tweaks.

Also, the book’s home page has collected links to all the videos, so if you just want to do the iOS programming course, that lays them out pretty clearly. Or you can walk through the episodes category here on invalidstream.com.

Finally, if you enjoy visual novels like Muv-Luv Alternative and Clannad, which I feature in the last segment of the show, you might be interested in visual;conference, an online webinar for VN creators. It’s being held Saturday, January 13, and I’ll be attending (not speaking, ha ha, but say hi on the discord if you’re there too).

Build: iOS 10 SDK Development, Chapter 12

The app is ready to make its debut… now what? In the final video of this series, we look at how to polish your app for submission to the App Store by giving it a proper app icon and launch screen, clean up the build and version numbers. Then we show how to do archive builds, manage them in the organizer, and set up the metadata on Apple’s developer and iTunes Connect websites to upload your build, send it to testers with TestFlight, and finally submit it for approval to go on the store.

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Play: jukebeat

Konami’s Dance Dance Revolution games for iOS are lost to the 32-bit-pocalypse, but they still have several installments of their other music game series on the platform. One is jukebeat, a tap-with-the-music game where your fingers need to keep up with a 4×4 grid of buttons to press. It’s a simple concept and doesn’t require special hardware, but fares merely OK in its mobile version. One sticking point: you only get a miserly three songs to start, and song packs are $4 each.

Read: Muv-Luv Alternative, Episode 5, Part 2

Yuuko’s experiments sending Takeru back to his world start to show signs of progress, as Takeru can briefly return to his old body and re-experience scenes from “Muv-Luv Extra”, but as merely a captive observer to these events, the project still has a long way to go. Takeru also gets an opportunity to speed up history by skipping the volcano evacuation misadventure at Mt. Tengen seen in “Muv-Luv Unlimited”… surely this major change to the timeline can only lead to good things, right?

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Notes

With the iOS 10 SDK Development material now completed, I’m going to take a couple weeks’ hiatus to plan, organize, and figure out what’s next. Watch the invalidstream.com website or @invalidstream on Twitter for an announcement about when livestreams will resume.